Craft and the Limits of Skill: Handicrafts Revivalism and the Problem of Technique

By Peter Betjemann, Oregon State University

자료: Journal of Design History 2008. 21(2):183-193. http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/2/183

Abstract: 

Skill and technique appear axiomatic to the definition of handicraft. And no designers are more closely associated with defending skilled human labour than the leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and America. This essay, however, proposes that industrial-era definitions of handicraft—originating with figures such as T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, William Morris, Gustav Stickley and even the sociologist Thorstein Veblen—are in fact predicated on a paradoxical relationship to skill. For if skilled labour seems the self-evident alternative to mechanical production, it is also true that machines, capable of absolute precision and uniformity, threaten the traditional associations of craft and perfect workmanship. The era of the Arts and Crafts Movement thus developed ways of thinking about craft that are sceptical of practised, learned or reproducible technique. This essay probes the implications of that epistemological shift, considering its effects on the aesthetics of craft, on the class dynamics of handicrafts revivalism and on the popularization of a medieval style (rather than, say, eighteenth-century models) as the paradigm of the handcrafted. Rethinking the relation of craft and skill, the article offers an alternative to established historiographical models in which practical skilled labour was steamrolled by shoddy industrial production or modern marketplace ideals. Instead, I suggest that industrial-era definitions of skill do not support conventional distinctions of craft and consumerism, practicality and rarity or simplicity and excess.

Key Words: arts and crafts movement • consumerism • craft • mechanization • skill

※  Let's review this article someday before long......